What is Coca‑Cola doing to reduce water wastage?

Water is essential to our business, as it is the main ingredient in all our drinks. We currently use about 1.36 litres of water to every litre of drink produced, but we want to improve on this, and use only 1.2 litres by 2020.

Our strategy is to reduce, recycle and replenish the water we use. Under our water stewardship strategy, we're aiming to return safely to nature an amount of water equivalent to that which we use in all our drinks and their production. One of the things we've done is to install water meters in all our factories to show where we can be more efficient, and this has already helped us improve our water usage ratio by 21 per cent since 2001.

We're reusing water, too. In one of our factories the water that washes empty cans is now used to cool our pumping equipment, and where water used to wash empty packages we often use air to do the same job in many of our factories.

We also want to make sure that the water we use doesn't affect the local communities around us. In 2006, for example, we introduced a second borehole at our Edmonton factory, to draw water from 80-90 metres below ground where supplies are plentiful. We also invest in community water programmes where we operate in areas of water stress, so that we replenish the water used in our drinks.